Reading notes: Bacteria to AI

Quotes, summaries and observations from bacteria-to-ai.

[TOC]

Chapter 1

Central theme: combat anthropocentrism and usggest other perspective more conductive to survival and flourishing.

• Anthropomorphism: unavoidable
• Anthropocentrism: positions humans at the center: conceptually, politically, socially, and economically. We are the most important.

Presumed superiority lies in advance human cognition

To combat anthropocentrism is to rethink and reposition human cognitive capabilities.

Most effective approach: decouple cognition and consciousness.

By biomass, about 90 percent by weight of Earth species are nonconscious.

Integrated cognitive framework (ICF)

• to create a platform in which human conscious cognition can be put in relation to nonconscious cognitions both with humans and within the greater-than-human world.

• Integrated: overlaps and divergences between different kinds of cognitive capacities and origin stories can be compared and contrasted.

• Create a densely textured contextual landscape of high dimensionality that never resolves to a smooth homogeneous surface (Claude: this could be a seed for constitution or mission of my garden.)

ICF compares and contrasts tribraided origin stories in quantum mechanics, evolutionary biology and technics. Each insists on the conconstitutive power of relationalities.

Juxtaposing origin stories reveals structural similarities and the accellerating pace at which they become entangled with each other.

Anthropocentrism in more detail

1. Anthropocentrism implies human supremacy, more specifically that the human is and should be the measure by which all other organisms are judged.

   • Implication: only humans have the right to judge what is in the world, and what is not.

   • N. Katherine Hayles: all creatures have world horizons, or umwelten, specific for their species, including humans, and these world horizons may overlap, but never entirely coincide.

   • Ethical implication: no umwelt has the right to dominate the others and declare that it alone is the proper and right way to see the world.

2. Anthropocentrism implies that humans are at the center of the action, overseeing and dictating what happens.

3. In reality, human life is intertwined with many different life forms and in many different ways. Entirely dependent on others for its existence.

Antropocentrism implies that humans alone are the deciders, also for everyone else.

Reality: decisions, like agency, are distributed throughout the collectivities of humans, non-humans, and computational media => this is called a cognitive assemblage.

Even when humans are in control, their assumptions have been formed and mediated by prior decisions and interpretations made by computational media.

Recasting cognition

Cognition is more and broader than just consciousness.

Much of human action and behavior is influenced by neuronal processes that happen below the threshold of consciousness and yet are critical for consciousness to function => nonconscious cognition.

Demonstrates that consciousness is not necessary for cognitive acts to take place.

• Cognition can be extended to nonconscious organisms, even those without brains.
• May also include computational media

Hayles claim: computational media, working together with humans in cognitive assemblages are responsible for most of the worlds work today.

Side note: humans vs human beings

human as noun vs human as adjective

If human being, why not whale being, dog beings or octopus beings? Because we do not recognise these creatures as worthy of the title ‘beings’. Try to avoid language that enforces anthropocentric assumptions.

Cognitive assemblages (p6)